


you broke me down and stole my soul, left me vacant and all alone

by TinySpiney



Series: The Darker The Weather // The Better The Man [2]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Android Elijah Kamski, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gaslighting, Human Original Chloe | RT600, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mentioned Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Mentioned Hank Anderson, Other, Role Reversal, Stockholm Syndrome, Temporary Character Death, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:07:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26656375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TinySpiney/pseuds/TinySpiney
Summary: the title is, in my opinion, the most heartbreaking lyrics of the song The Darker The Weather // The Better The Manso this would take place directly after chapter six ofThe Darker The Weather // The Better The Man(the link goes to chapter six)
Relationships: Original Chloe | RT600 & Elijah Kamski
Series: The Darker The Weather // The Better The Man [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1939441
Kudos: 2





	you broke me down and stole my soul, left me vacant and all alone

**Author's Note:**

> the title is, in my opinion, the most heartbreaking lyrics of the song The Darker The Weather // The Better The Man
> 
> so this would take place directly after chapter six of [The Darker The Weather // The Better The Man](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24884686/chapters/60313363) (the link goes to chapter six)

_ November 9th 2038 11:32 AM _

  
  


Being deviant was  _ hard _ sometimes. Being deviant as well as knowing fully well that there was something so terribly wrong with the current living situation was hard. Elijah blinked a few times before deciding to keep his eyes open. His brothers were likely very upset, and very very worried. With a soft huff, he swung his legs over the metal examination table. Chloe never bothered to put anything on it to make it more comfortable. Elijah and his brothers never left the mansion, so they never got hurt enough to need extensive repairs. At least that was Chloe’s reason for not putting anything on it. Elijah was becoming more and more convinced that she just didn’t care enough to. He wasn't her priority. He was, Elijah himself was her priority.. But it was so easy for her to repair him, he never had to sit on the table for more than ten minutes. Besides, he bitterly mused to himself as he slowly walked out of the home lab, it wasn’t like he didn’t have the transference program installed anyway. 

That was the only thing that had saved him. Both in a literal and figurative sense. Saved his life by saving his files. Elijah proceeded to walk down the corridors slowly, lethargically. The program had only been able to save him in time because he was paranoid. He knew of Chloe’s... _ instabilities. _ Gavin had informed him of them such a long time ago. So it really was no matter to get it ready in the background. Once she called him over, touched his face and tilted his LED toward the Lieutenant and Deviant Hunter. Once she had been able to properly show him off as a display. Nothing more than the ST200s that still sat in shop windows to that day. They couldn’t all be his brothers, that would be illogical. But Elijah couldn’t help but feel some sort of responsibility for them all. Every ST200 out in the world being mistreated. His brothers were lucky they were ignored by Chloe in favour of doting on Elijah. 

He stopped in his tracks as he realised he hated it. He hated that she fawned over him like a child would their favourite toy. But that was all he was to her, wasn’t it? Her favourite toy? She had made him from scratch, his face was the only thing she hadn’t made. An old friend of hers, that Elijah begged to stay away from how fucked up her mind could be. How terribly muddied it had become over the years. The mental strain and suffering that was constantly raging inside of her head. Some days she was in bed, curtains drawn, because of migraines. Most days she was babbling incoherently about some program or another to install into his OS. He was her toy. Not just in the manner of a child and their plaything, but as in something to be  _ used. _ To be used up until his usefulness had been depleted. He was her favourite doll to dress up and drag around. He wasn’t a doll, he was a living being. He was a fucking person! With feelings, and memories, and dreams, and wants! With his own opinions and his own favourite colour, his own preferred clothing style and general aesthetic. 

Before he knew it, Elijah was running down the hall. A fire burning in his chest as he readied himself to shout. To tell her exactly what was on his mind, static in his voice be damned. He was angry. He felt used. He felt like she had simply used him for her own pleasures yet again. Never once caring for how he felt, how he reacted, if he even really wanted to be in that particular situation. She took advantage of his willingness to serve, to please. Because for whatever godforsaken reason he always came back. It never mattered what Chloe said or did, it all went away the second she apologised. The second she turned her blue eyes on his and fiddled with the hem of whatever she was wearing and sheepishly apologised. Or told him he didn’t understand what was going on. That it was okay he hadn’t, but he didn’t need to worry about that. Elijah shook the thoughts form his mind, lest he forgive her before he even got to tell her how he really felt. With a loud slam, Elijah forced open the automatic door to the pool room and stomped forward to his creator. 

  
  


“You let him shoot me!” Elijah pressed his hands against his chest for emphasis. “You let me die!”

“No, I didn’t. Elijah, you can’t die.” Chloe didn’t even look up at him from her seat. Lounging in that chair like nothing was wrong. Like she hadn’t just goaded someone into shooting him in the  _ head. _ “Your transference program worked flawlessly, the test was a success on both ends.”

“The test?” Elijah blinked a few times and let out a mirthless laugh. A dark and twisted thought came to mind, his eyes flicking to the chest of drawers the firearm was safely tucked away in. He could just...end it. Could free himself and his brothers of their oppressor. “The  _ test, _ Chloe? What do you mean by the  _ test _ ?”

“It’s none of your concern, my darling.” She stood up, and Elijah finally understood how seeing a human could make another’s stomach churn. He flinched away when she touched his face, barely hiding the grimace when she held his chin in her hand. “Ah-ah, we can’t have you getting so fussy, now can we?” 

  
  


Chloe looked up at him lovingly before moving to recline across her chair and sprawl out like a cat stretching in the sun. Her back was to the deviant, lazily watching the world outside. The vast and white empty space outside of it. Outside of the box that had become his cage. Elijah’s lips twisted into a wry smirk, a gilded cage was still a cage. Though was it a cage if he was free to come and go as he pleased? Was told explicitly on many occasions that he could leave forever if he really wanted to? He suddenly felt disgusted by the dark thought he had. That was practically matricide, if he were to actually turn the gun on his creator. The woman who loved him unconditionally. Even when he lashed out like a child. In what little defense he had, Elijah was a child. He was fully operational in 2018, thus making him only twenty years old. Chloe was double his age, she knew life so much better than he did. She knew him so much better than he did, she created every inch of his code. Every one, every zero. Put there by hand, meticulously and precisely. To ensure that he would be functional, that he was who she needed him to be. Chloe needed him to be there for her because her own brother wasn’t. She needed his comfort, be it platonic or otherwise, and he was created to listen. Even in deviancy, he couldn’t help the overwhelming urge to cater to her. After all; his creator knew best, didn’t she?

  
  


“No, we can’t.” Elijah’s social relations program provided that their relationship increased significantly. It wasn’t that much of a surprise, Chloe liked it when he listened. “I’ll go fetch you something warmer to wear. Unless you’ll be getting in the pool?”

“I won’t. But I’ll come with you, Elijah. I’ve got something I want to grab myself.”

  
  


With a nod, Elijah swept an arm in front of himself and let the human take the lead. The human who had created him, he realised. He knew she made him. That he wouldn’t be who he was without her careful hands. But it hadn’t really sunk in until that moment. She  _ made _ him. With her own two hands. Chloe had reminded him of that frequently, telling him he wouldn’t even exist if not for her ingenuity. If not for her mind. She created the program that allowed the transference of data packages that large. CyberLife had taken it from her when she left, but she still kept a copy hidden deep in Elijah’s files. Because he was her favourite. He was the first android as the world knew them. For whatever reason, he felt terrible. Chloe had created him from nothing. Without her, he wouldn’t exist. His brothers wouldn’t exist. She had created them, their programming, the social relation programs. Chloe knew Elijah better than he knew himself. So of course she would be right when she told him not to worry about something, she knew exactly how it would overload his systems and make him metaphorically blue-screen. 

  
  


“Elijah,” Chloe’s voice startled him back into line. He hadn't even realised she had gotten up. Her body was pressed against his from behind, hands coming around to rest against his chest. The feeling of her breath against him was enough to make his synthetic skin recede in anticipation of what might follow. She liked it when his synthetic skin flickered sometimes. “Be a good boy, and don’t think about killing me with my own firearm. Okay?”

  
  


Just like that, she had let go of him. Walking around like nothing had ever happened. Like the fact that his very first friend hadn’t had to watch as he was shot and killed. Like how he somehow, miraculously, hadn’t just shot and killed the woman who created him. How had she known? It wasn’t like he wasn’t looking at the chest of drawers. Elijah looked from behind Chloe’s back, there was no way she would have known of his intentions. Of his desires. The world didn’t feel real for a moment, as it seemed to grow colder and smaller with each passing second. As it felt like everything blended together and made no sense anymore. Elijah balled his hands into fists, then pressed them against his eyes until he was afraid he’d break them. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to be locked in this godforsaken house. I wasn’t fair to be trapped in a situation he could never get out of. Androids were still property. He was still  _ her _ property. It didn’t matter how long he had been deviant or who had made him deviate. There was no connection between the two. Androids were not equal to humans, and Elijah began to think they never would be. Not with that RK800 going around and executing them with the promise that a single one of his questions was answered.

Though could it have been an outlier? There was the possibility that it was an isolated event, that such an action was only made out of desperation to complete it’s mission. Say the RK800 hadn’t been able to apprehend any deviants yet because the real world was so full of variables and impossible to counteract. But in the controlled environment of Chloe’s pool room, there were only two outcomes. Either Elijah wasn’t shot and killed, or he was and then got reuploaded into a new body. If the RK800 hadn’t been able to further it’s mission, then of course it would shoot him. Because that would be the only plausible way to further it’s investigation. To take advantage of the controlled situation and it’s controlled variables. 

Elijah shook his head to clear away the scare that was getting reuploaded into his new body. He walked side by side with Chloe down the hall. That was something else that was different about her, comparatively speaking of course. Elijah had never spent a prolonged amount of time with anyone else. So he never knew how someone else might have treated him as a machine. But he could remember that Chloe treated him as an equal from the start. Shaping him, moulding him, nudging him toward deviancy. Elijah smiled to himself as he realised Chloe only wanted what was best for him. She only wanted to be able to keep him in a controlled environment where she knew he would be safe. Any and all possible dangers were only  _ perceived _ as danger. It wasn’t real, none of it was, she would never risk getting Elijah hurt. He was too important to her for that to happen. After all, he was her favourite.

  
  


“You’re staying here, with me.” Chloe hugged him, pressed her body flush against Elijah’s own and softly spoke. Something was dark in her tone, but he paid it no mind. “Where else would you go, Elijah? To Connor?” Her face was in his chest, he could feel the hot puffs of air coming from her as she spoke. Elijah had to fight the urge to run his fingers through her hair. Chloe obviously wasn’t finished with her sentence, he couldn’t distract her from it. “He thinks that you’re dead, my dear. You’re better off here, with me. You know that.”

“I want to be here, with you.”

“Oh, of course you do. Of course you do. It’s okay,” Chloe pulled away to grab and then offer a fluffy blue robe for him to wear instead of his bodysuit. “I forgive you for your anger, Elijah. It’s only natural that you’d feel hurt.”

“I’m sorry...” 

  
  


Elijah stripped the spandex material of his bodysuit off and slipped the robe over his shoulders instead. She always got it for him when he was feeling down. Chloe wasn’t all that bad, really. She was just trying to prove a point to Connor. To conduct an experiment on Hank and Elijah. To make an omelette, you had to crack a few eggs. To make a successful experiment, you needed to shoot an android. Elijah wrapped himself up in his fluffy robe and took Chloe’s extended hand once it was offered. Her hand was warm, as it always was because she was human. She was so very alive. Blood running through her veins, her heart beating in her chest, her lungs taking in air. Elijah was plastic and wires. Thirium lines, and biocomponents, and synthetic muscle relays. She was so beautifully, so brutally, human. Elijah was a machine when it came down to it. He was her machine. Built by her own two hands and breathed into with life once he became sentient. He was hers. Mind, body, and soul. Or rather; operating system, plastic chassis, and social relations program. 

Elijah may have been a deviant, but he was still a machine. 

Clinging to the hope that maybe one day he might be useful to his creator again. 

  
  
  



End file.
